The Use of the Nurse in Jean Anouilhs' Antigone and Dr.Rank in Henrik Ibsens' A Dolls' House to Provide Exposition.

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The Use of the Nurse in Jean Anouilhs’ Antigone and Dr.Rank in Henrik Ibsens’ A Dolls’ House to Provide Exposition.

Hannah C. Karwatowska

The Awty International School: D0436-020

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        Throughout the evolution of literature, Greek through Modern, exposition has remained vital to the comprehension of literary work.  In most pieces, contemporary or not, the author uses exposition to provide background information on main characters or past important events.  Exposition can help to explain a character’s motive, personality or relationships with others.  In Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and also in Henrik Ibsen’s A Dolls’ House, the authors create two characters, the Nurse, and Dr. Rank, specifically for this purpose. The authors use them repetitively to provide exposition on some of the main characters, but use different means to reveal this background information.   The intent of this paper is to examine the differences between these two authors’ methods of providing exposition.

        These minor characters provide most of the background information in the first scenes.  The Nurse in Anouilh’s Antigone provides exposition for Antigone and her sister Ismene, the main female roles in the play. Dr. Rank in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House provides exposition on a morally ambiguous character, Krogstad.  This provision of exposition helps the reader to understand motives and also behavior towards a character before the character admits to himself, and the reader, his ambiguous actions.

        The Nurse, speaking endearingly of her trustees, provides a large amount of background information within two pages, mostly because of Anouilh’s descriptive, informative writing style.  Due the effusive attitude of the Nurse, and given the situation in hand, she divulges information about the girl’s dead mother, their childhood, and the girl’s current living relations, saying:

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Yes says she! God save us! I took her when she wasn’t that high.  I promised her poor mother I’d make a lady out of her. And look at her! Don’t you go thinking this is the end of this, my young’un…But your Uncle Creon will hear of this! That, I promise you!  (Anouilh 8)

The nurse is used in a Brechtian way to describe Antigone’s past and to make her life clearer to the reader. In her overly emotional attitude, she easily talks of past experiences, and how Antigone came to be in her current situation. ...

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